


The Missing Piece

by celluloidbroomcloset



Category: The Avengers (TV)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-03-17
Updated: 2015-03-17
Packaged: 2018-03-18 08:09:28
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,127
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3562436
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/celluloidbroomcloset/pseuds/celluloidbroomcloset
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Set following the events in The New Avengers episode K is for Kill. John Steed and Emma Peel reunite after ten years apart.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Missing Piece

She was there. He scarcely credited it – had even tried to pinch himself several times in the course of the evening, just to be certain he hadn’t finally relinquished his hold on reality. But it was true. She was there. Emma Peel.

Not Emma Peel any more, though. Emma Knight. How many times over the past few years since he heard of her divorce had he thought about calling her? But he always hung it up after the first few rings. What would he say? ‘Hello? Remember me? The man you left alone in an apartment ten years ago? How have you been?’ Every time he ran the conversation over in his head, it all came out the same. He never got past hello.

Then, finally, he had a reason to call her. It was an excuse, but it was a good one. As soon as he heard her voice … he could not have predicted that even with ten years between them, she would still affect him so intensely. That same jumping excitement at the pit of his stomach; the same delight just in hearing her deep, teasing voice, speak his name.

He did not tell her how much she hurt him. With one chaste kiss, she left behind her a broken man. But he’d picked up the pieces and he’d moved on. He wasn’t the same and he knew it, but he had moved on. He put the pieces back together as best he could. All of them. Except one.

Yet it was so natural to ask her dinner. Natural to sit across from her in the crowded room and listen to her stories. He recounted for her the intervening years – long and painful, though he never said that. They steered clear of dangerous conversation: her marriage, her divorce, Tara, his near retirement, and the unspoken pain left in the wake of a single newspaper headline. 

The moment he saw her again, he saw the missing piece. The thing that kept him from being whole. She stood in his sitting room, drinking his champagne, commenting on his photographs, being her usual charming, lovely self. Pretending she did not know what she’d taken from him.

He still loved her, more than he’d loved anyone or anything in his life. He had loved her for all the ten years she'd been gone and the loss of her still tore at him. When the wound was open, he had actually cried, alone in his empty apartment still haunted by her. Over the years, the pain dulled to a throbbing, empty ache. But it had always been there, and seeing her again brought it all back. How deeply he loved her; how deeply she hurt him. How badly he missed her.

“Steed?”

He turned. She sat on his sofa, smiling at him. She was older, and in some ways more beautiful than she had been ten years ago. She gestured at the photographs arranged behind her.

“They’re very lovely,” she said. “Who are they?”

Steed regarded the pictures. Horses, polo matches, a … woman or two.

“Old friends,” he said.

“A likely story,” she teased. “Do you always keep pictures of your old loves scattered about the house?”

“Some.” He sat down beside her. “But they are not old loves.”

She tried to smile, but she did not put herself into it. Still so beautiful, and those brown eyes still looked at him with such tenderness. Did she look on him now as nothing more than an old friend? He passed his hand through his still thick but certainly greying hair. Ten years had been less kind to him than it had to her.

He felt a pressure on his palm. Her hand had slipped into his.

“I made a terrible mistake, Steed,” she said.

“I don’t know what you mean, Mrs. … Miss Knight.”

“You used to call me Emma.”

“I used to call you Mrs. Peel. That doesn’t seem appropriate now.”

He allowed an edge of anger to creep into his voice. She took her hand away and broke their gaze, eyes traveling over the pictures.

“What are their names?” she said, a strain in her voice.

“I don’t remember.”

“They’re very lovely.”

“You said that once before. What do you mean by mistake?”

She did not answer for a moment. Her face was turned away.

“Peter." Her voice cracked. “Leaving you for him. It was a mistake and I’ve regretted it for ten years.”

He did not expect her to be so blunt. He expected some subterfuge, some long conversation, talking around the issue. Not for her to come right out with it. She faced him and there were tears in her eyes.

“It’s too late, isn’t it?” she was saying. “It’s come ten years too late. I tried … I wanted to call you. I tried to, a thousand different times, but it never … I never knew how to begin.”

She laughed. “ ‘Hello? How are you? My marriage has failed because I never stopped loving you? How about dinner?’"

Another pause. His heart froze. Go on, Emma. For God's sake, go on.

"I never should have left you, Steed. I’ve even forgotten why I did. And now it’s too late.”

She looked down, embarrassed. She was trying to continue. but he saw that there was nothing more left to say. Nothing, except...

“Tell me it’s not too late,” she whispered.

He did not even know he had moved. It was magnetic attraction that brought his hand up to her cheek. She turned her face up. Her soft eyes that he lost himself in every day for those few wonderful years, brimming now with un-cried tears. She kissed his palm. Her mouth was so soft, so supple. Just as he remembered it. He brought his other hand up and cupped her face.

When had he ever been able to deny her anything?

“It’s not too late,” he said, and meant it.

She kissed his hand, then his fingers one by one, ending on the thumb, taking the tip into her mouth before releasing it. Carefully, as though the contact would burn her, she set her hand against his chest.

“I’m so sorry, John.”

He kissed her. Tentatively, being certain that she would let him. She tasted the same. She felt the same. It was a wonderful sameness. He caressed the side of her face, pressing his fingers into the hollow beneath her ear and was rewarded with a wonderful, breathy sigh. Her hand crept up his chest, holding onto his shirt as though he might pull away if she didn’t. 

After a long while, they separated.

“Would you like to see the rest of the house?” he asked.

“I’d love to.”

Any other woman he would have walked around the house, shown her the study, the games room, his trophies. They would have talked, seduced each other, and slowly but surely made their way – almost by accident – to the bedroom. Then a night of pleasure, and the next morning breakfast. She’d leave by midday and he would go on with his life.

But Emma Knight was not going to be just another woman to pass through his bed. If she left him in the morning all that was remained of his ability to love would go with her.

They came to the bedroom door and she went in, without even asking the question. He stepped in behind her. 

The light from the bedside lamp was dim. His bed looked large - too large for him alone. Emma stood in the center of the room, waiting, avoiding his eyes. The closer he came, the more nervous she seemed. He did not touch her. 

“It’s been a long time, Steed,” she said.

“If you don’t want to…”

“I do. I’m just afraid.” She shot out a nervous laugh. "Isn't that ridiculous?"

Tonight was a night for honesty. 

"No," he said, slowly. "I'm afraid you'll leave me again."

She touched the knot of his tie. "Oh, Steed."

“Emma, be kind to an old man. I don’t want to wake up in the morning and find you gone. I won’t survive it.” 

The eyes that now looked up into his were unveiled, full of love.

“I’ll stay until you ask me to go,” she said.

“That could be a long time.”

Her smile was the loveliest thing he’d ever seen. “I’m counting on it.”

She turned and lifted her hair. Her neck was long and white, edged by the black of her dress. He pressed a kiss to her neck. He could feel her breathing. 

He slid the zipper of her dress down and followed it with his mouth, trailing kisses down her spine until he came to the small of her back. He traced the shape of her back with his eyes and the tips of his fingers as he rose. Soft, white, lightly freckled skin. He brought his hands up to her shoulders. Emma trembled as he touched her. He tried to conceal the tremor in his own hands as he drew the silken dress from her arms, watched it drop to the floor around her ankles. She turned to face him.

She was still so beautiful. He was almost frightened to touch her again lest she melt, dissolve, vanish, as she’d vanished so many times in his dreams, leaving him alone, reaching out for her. Or worse, reaching out and touching someone who wasn’t her. It was unfair to ache for one woman while he was with another. He’d tried so hard not to.

As nervous as she obviously was – more nervous than the first time they’d slept together, certainly – she could not repress a smile at his recalcitrance.

“I’m not going to break, Steed.”

“Forgive me,” he replied, meeting her eyes. “I’ve lived too long with a ghost.”

“After all those women?”

“They’re not you.”

She smiled, kindly. “I’m not a ghost.”

She brought his hand up to her breast. She was real. Perfectly, wonderfully real. He kissed her, cupping her breast, feeling the nipple harden as he moved his fingers along it. She brought her hand up beneath his hair and held his head, pressing her body into his. He reacted to her as he’d always done, just from a look, hardening against her. She sighed, deep in her throat.

Then she was undressing him, stripping off coat, tie, shirt, dropping them to the floor, twining her body around his as he kissed her, stroked her, ran his hands all over her. She undid his belt, slipped a hand into his trousers. He twitched as her hand grasped him, as though he'd never been touched before.. They fell back onto the bed, arms and legs wound about each other.

She was naked beneath him, finally, after so many years, back in his bed, in his arms, the real her, the real Emma, the only woman he ever loved. He could make love to her, give her pleasure, hear her cry out his name. He could obliterate the years that had separated them, the years spent alone, the years he’d wasted with other women. She was his; he claimed her. And he belonged to her.

He lowered his head to her breast, kissing her, running his tongue along the pointed nipple. He heard her breathing quicken; her heart pounded against him. Emma's hands roamed over his back. He loved to be stroked by her, her fingers sliding through his hair and across his shoulders, kneading the muscles. No one else ever thought to touch him like that. 

But it was not enough. Steed closed his hands around her hips and pressed on them; he scraped his nails gently down her sides, her buttocks and across her thighs. He knew that little bite delighted her, the ever-so-slight melding of pleasure and pain. His mouth descended her body. He wanted to rediscover all of her, every curve and bend he knew so well and had imagined every night for ten years. He felt her respond to him with tiny sounds of increasing pleasure as he ran his hands along her whole body, and still moved, inexorably, downwards with his mouth.

“I missed you,” he said, amazed at how easy it was to say. “I missed this. It’s never the same with anyone else.”

“Steed,” she sighed, caressing the back of his head. “My darling Steed.”

He raised up and looked at her. Her face was already transformed in the soft light.

He kissed her mouth and neck again, and slid back down her body as she parted her legs for him. He stroked the insides of her thighs with his hands and mouth, waiting, wanting to create a world where he tasted nothing but her, where she felt nothing but him. She gasped when his tongue brushed her clitoris. He smiled and kissed her, scraping his nails gently down her flanks as her body begin to shift. Her hips rose to meet the strokes of his mouth and tongue. He slipped two fingers inside of her. Her legs tightened and she let loose a deep, beautiful moan. 

The first time he’d tried this, many years before, she’d practically kicked him off the bed. Her eventual enthusiasm for the act was encouraging, though, and she never responded quite so violently after that. As she later explained to him, no one had ever even thought to do it before. It was then that he realized that Emma Peel, for all her sophistication, had never been with a man who cared as much for her pleasure as for his own. This struck him as a point of a pride, one which she several times reprimanded him for – she called it conceit. But she never objected.

Now, as he listened to her heightened moans, he imagined that he was still the only man to make her feel like this. 

But his own body was making demands of its own, and he wanted to join her, for the first time in ten years. 

She seemed to have the same idea, for she managed to say – or he thought she said –

“Steed, please. I need you.”

He kissed her once more, then rose and covered her with his body. Her arms clasped him, fingers running up and down his spine. Then her hand reached down for him and he shifted enough, let her guide him into her. He slid in easily, as though he belonged there. He did belong there.

He closed his eyes, reveling for a moment in the sensation of being inside her. When he opened them again, she was looking up at him. Her chest rose and fell with her labored breaths. Her eyes were wide and shining. She ran her hands along his shoulders.

“I missed you.”

He repressed the sob that rose in his throat.

The last time they’d made love, only a few days before Peel’s return, had been just another in a long line of deeply satisfying encounters. Steed tried in the intervening years to make more of it than it was, to imagine that buried somewhere in those moments was the seed of whatever made her leave him. But the worst part of it was that he could not find it. They’d been happy, and it had all been wrenched away from him. In his pride and conceit he had not done what he wanted to, he had not fallen to his knees and begged her to stay. She broke him. She was now the only one who could make him whole.

Their movements matched each other, as they always had. Perfectly in sync. He drew her legs up and leaned forward as he drove into her. He kept his eyes open; he wanted to see her, watch her face as she neared that crest. She was glowing, her body came alive around him. Her nails sank into his back, adding just that touch of pain to the building pleasure that coursed through him. He wanted it to go on forever.

“Deeper, Steed,” she begged, raising her legs to wrap around his lower back. “Please.”

He went as deeply into her as he could, worried he would hurt her, yet knowing that he never did. She emitted a sharp cry that made him balk and stop moving. He searched her face for an answer. She shook her head and smiled and drew his head down. He curved his face into her neck, kissing her throat as he thrust into her again and again.

“Emma,” he moaned, desperately maintaining control. “God, Emma.”

Thankfully, she was as close as he was. Another thrust, bearing down into her as far as he could, and she came, crying out, contracting around him, her whole body shaking with the force of her orgasm. He went with her, the pleasure shooting through him, engulfing him in fire and ice at once, and he emptied into her, happier, better and more complete than he’d been in many years.

For many years Steed appreciated women, enjoyed them, wanted them to enjoy him. But every flirtation, every little romance, every sensual night – none of it compared with her. It was love, connection, understanding, deep affection; it was an electrical current that held them to each other, created the moment they met and never broken. Ten years had passed and still it was the same. 

Steed did not know how long they lay there. She began to stroke his hair, as she did sometimes after a particularly difficult case, or a particularly pleasurable round of love-making.

“Emma.” He sighed into her collarbone and knew with that one word, he was a different man. 

She kissed his cheek. He could feel her breath in his ear as she said, “I love you. I always loved you.”

Steed raised his head. How many times had he told her, and never received a response? He knew, of course – he never doubted that she loved him. But he also never realized how much he wanted to hear her say it.

He rolled off of her and arranged himself beside her, as close as they could get. She still liked being held. As he cradled her in his arms, she sighed, a small contented noise that struck him to the heart.

“I do love you,” he whispered. “In case you missed it.”

“I thought so. I like your house, Steed. A bit big.”

“Ostentacious, like me.”

“But very stylish.” She tapped his nose. “Like you.”

She smiled at him and he smiled back. After everything, after all the years, it was that easy to bring her back into his life. He closed his eyes and bent his body around hers. He fit her as she fit him, like a missing piece that had finally been found.


End file.
